Commentary

Rescuing Investigative Journalism

Richard Farson

We are about to lose our newspapers, and with them our democracy. Yes, our democracy.

Major newspapers are closing foreign bureaus and laying off reporters by the hundreds. The Tribune, owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun and nine other newspapers has declared bankruptcy. The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News have cut back deliveries to two or three days a week. Michael Hirschorn, writing in the Atlantic, suggests that the demise of the New York Times could come as early as May. Because newspapers are losing advertisers to the web, observers predict they will continue to suffer massive reductions, double digit deficits, and most believe they are doomed.

We simply cannot allow that to happen. Newspapers make a unique and absolutely necessary contribution to our society. They supply us with in-depth investigative journalism, requiring hundreds of trained and experienced professionals who employ proven methods to give depth to their research and validity to the facts they unearth. Working in teams and observing a strict code of ethics in the pursuit of the truth, they often devote themselves to a particular story for months, sometimes years.

These extensive reports give enough of us the detailed information we need to understand the exceedingly complex workings of our world, our society, and our government. By keeping watch over these areas, journalists provide the indispensible service of protecting us from rampant corruption and potential tyranny.

Our founding fathers understood the absolute need for such trustworthy information, reflected in their determination to guarantee a free press. Thomas Jefferson made this dramatically clear by saying that if he had to choose between government without the press, or the press without government, he would choose the latter. They understood what we seem to be forgetting, that we cannot have democracy without investigative journalism.

When something is so important that our democracy cannot survive without it, rescuing it becomes a matter of public concern. We must support newspapers for the same reason that we support education, healthcare, defense, justice, transportation, science, social security, and many other segments of our society that we simply must have and for which there is no other adequate source of support.

By and large, journalists are nervous about such an idea, fearing government control. But while that possibility cannot be discounted, we have plenty of experience that should put that fear to rest. We have our Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) both subsidized by the taxpayer through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting but designed to prevent government interference.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) enjoys a much longer history and far greater government support than do our public broadcasting systems, a yet both ours and theirs always have proven able to air highly critical views of our governments. It is ironic that journalists would prefer to seek support from the field of advertising, surely one of the most deceptive and least ethical segments of business.

No profession should be made vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the market. Journalism is a respected profession that must be able to exercise judgment free of influence from market interests. In broadcast journalism we have seen what happens when that posture is abandoned, when the news departments are changed from "cost centers" to "profit centers" and required to appeal to the market.

A compelling illustration occurred when the Downing Street Memo about the US fixing the intelligence to lure Britain into the Iraq war became known (conceivably an impeachable offense). A total of six news segments on that subject were presented on the three commercial TV networks (all on CBS). At the same time, to cover the Michael Jackson trial, these three networks presented 465 news segments. That market-oriented commoditization of journalism renders it almost totally useless in protecting our democracy and advancing our society.

And let’s be realistic and not ignore our experience with web technology over the last 25 years which suggests that people simply do not read long documents on screen. A thorough investigative report usually consists of more than seven thousand words at its first appearance, not to mention the mountain of words a study like Watergate can produce.

Imagine a three-tiered program subsidizing newspapers through a publically funded organization we might call the Corporation for Public Journalism. The top tier would be composed of, say, the five newspapers judged to have the best national and international investigative journalism, each receiving perhaps $200 million annually.

The second tier, made up of the next fifty largest city newspapers, would each receive $40 million annually to enable their regional investigations, and they would also profit from free news services supplied by the five larger papers that many of them now pay for. The remaining two thousand community papers would receive substantially less subsidy ($2 million each), but perhaps enough to remain in business and report investigations of their own communities.

The demise of the newspaper industry is imminent. When we lose investigative journalism, we will not lose democracy eventually; we will lose it right away. But organized properly, the total annual cost of such a subsidy program would probably not exceed five billion dollars…two weeks of the cost of the Iraq war. And our democracy is secured.